Startup TNT Ignites Western Canada with Tim Lynn

Startup TNT Ignites Western Canada with Tim Lynn

Kelly Kennedy : Welcome to episode 278 of the Business Development Podcast, and today we sit down with Tim Lynn, a powerhouse financial strategist, startup advisor, and co-founder of startup TNT, who's reshaping Alberta's entrepreneurial ecosystem and driving millions in angel capital into the hands of founders from successful exits to building one of Canada's most vibrant investment communities.

Tim brings insights that every entrepreneur needs to hear. Stick with us. You won't wanna miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal, and we couldn't agree more.

This is the Business Development Podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In broadcasting to the world, you'll get expert business development advice, tips, and experiences, and you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business, brought to you by Capital Business Development Capitalbd.ca.

Let's do it. Welcome to the The Business Development Podcast, and now your expert host. Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy : Hello. Welcome to episode 278 of the Business Development Podcast, and today it is my absolute pleasure to bring you Tim Lynn. Tim is a seasoned financial strategist and investment professional who is dedicated his career to empowering businesses With deep experience in Alberta's investment banking scene, Tim has become a trusted advisor to companies navigating corporate transactions, capital raising and financial modeling, equipped with A-C-P-A-C-F-A and CBV credentials.

He advises businesses as a fractional CFO, bringing critical expertise in cashflow management, forecasting, and customer economics to diverse sectors. Tim is committed to strengthening Alberta's entrepreneurial ecosystem as co-founder of Startup TNT. He is fostered a vibrant community of investors and founders deploying millions in angel capital and educating new investors across Canada.

Tim's passion for investing drives him to actively seek out companies transitioning to new ownership, bringing his expertise to both angel backed startups and traditional businesses. He is shaping the future of Alberta's economy with every deal. Tim, it is an honor to have you on the show.

Tim Lynn: Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kelly Kennedy : It's it's awesome dude. It's awesome. You know, we talked about this when we first met, but I was like, Tim, I need to have you for the Alberta Ecosystem series 'cause I've been doing this and there's been this gigantic missing piece that is Startup TNT. And so, dude, I am pumped. I'm revved up.

I'm excited to chat with you today. I'm excited to impart some wisdom onto our listeners. And just once again, thank you so much for joining me and not only joining me, but for the incredible work you are doing in Edmonton for the Alberta ecosystem.

Tim Lynn: No, and, and same to you. And I'm, I'm humbled to be among a great list of folks that you've already spoken with on the Alberta ecosystem.

So I'm like a little iota. What's going on here? So I appreciate you having me.

Kelly Kennedy : Oh, dude. It's amazing. It's amazing. I love Alberta, right? Like I'm from here. I'm Albertan to the core man. Born, born, just out, born in Edmonton, raised just outside in Stony Plain. Moved to Spruce Grove when I was a teenager.

I've spent a lot of time in Edmonton after that, and now we're back to Stony Plain. It's been like an interesting little, little circle.

Tim Lynn: But, but my problem, that all counts as Edmonton, that's like, absolutely. That doesn't count as like, moving away. That's Edmonton.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Yeah. It's like, like 10 minute drive.

We're still here. It's it's incredible, man. I love, I love being Albertan. I love being Canadian. I love, you know, the work we're doing right here in Edmonton, which is groundbreaking, you know, incredible work coming outta AMII and startup, TNT and all the amazing stuff that we have going on here. And the Alberta ecosystem was something that from the very beginning I knew I wanted to do.

And it's funny because when I started the show, Tim, I knew absolutely nothing about the Alberta tech industry at all, period. I was just dumb to it all. And I slowly, my eyes were open. It's like, holy crap, there is some crazy cool stuff happening right here in Edmonton. And then I found out that, you know, we're world leaders in a lot of things.

Like I had no idea how powerful Edmonton has become.

Tim Lynn: Yeah, there's a lot of raw horsepower here. It's, it's pretty fantastic. And there's, there's some great commercialization. I mean it at the time of recording the exit of Drive Wise is super recent, and who knows what they'll finally announced by the time that, that this is being heard by folks.

But, mid nine figure exit for the Edmonton region, unlocking a whole bunch of capital for to be recycled into the next generation of startups. And importantly, a whole bunch of fantastically talented people that are able to help commercialized Great. Great technologies. We have a university that's pumping out a whole pile of, of really interesting technology from, you know, life sciences to engineering technologies, to nano technologies, to artificial intelligence.

There's a bunch of really smart people here, and so I'm, I'm excited for where this is, this world is gonna take us.

Kelly Kennedy : Absolutely. And, and I think one of the challenges is there's so much incredible stuff happening in Alberta, in Edmonton, in Calgary, right? That it's really hard to like, understand how the whole thing fits together, which was why I was like, holy crap, I need to like do an Alberta ecosystem series.

And so at this point I have had the pleasure of interviewing Edmonton Chamber of Commerce, Edmonton Unlimited, Edmonton Regional Innovation Network, Alberta Innovates, PrairiesCan Alberta Women Entrepreneurs, BDC, Canada Startup TNT, and I'm sure I'm missing one. We talked about this before. There's just so much, like this is an incredible place to be, but trying to understand.

What is all this stuff and how does it fit together? I'll be honest, dude, I've gone through all of these interviews and I think I'm still confused about how it all fits together. I've learned a lot, but it's, it's a lot.

Tim Lynn: Yeah. I mean, I've been in it for five years and I don't think I've got a perfect understanding of it either.

So, yeah, there's people just looking to pull levers, a whole bunch of passionate people looking to help advance the community and, and working in the ways that they see best fit. And so people see gaps, people try and fill it in, and it, it's really awesome to have all levels of government really interested in helping advance the sector too.

That's a, it's a huge boost for the economy here.

Kelly Kennedy : Totally, totally. And, and here's the thing. I think the takeaway from this is, we may not have all the answers on how it fits together, but there are a lot of supports for you as an entrepreneur in Alberta.

Tim Lynn: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a, it's a great community of folks looking to, like I said, looking to push the ball ahead.

Yeah, it's a, and it takes a community, so it's great to have a lot of positive momentum here.

Kelly Kennedy : Absolutely. Absolutely. Tim, you're a serial entrepreneur. You've done some pretty incredible things right here in this city. Before we get into that today though, I would love to go back to the beginning.

Who is Tim Lynn? How the heck did you end up on this path?

Tim Lynn: Yeah, Tim Lynn, born and raised in Edmonton, born in the southeast of Edmonton, and then moved over into the southwest. Ultimately wanted to be an engineer all the way through from like grade four all the way until grade 12. My plan was, you know, I'm pretty good at math.

I like buildings, I like, you know, it's like a pretty well paid profession. This seems like a good path. I didn't really do a lot of thought into it. Because I was in grade school. Yes. And then ultimately I went to the, went to the Butterdome for the like, university career fair. What are we gonna be when we grow up?

Type thing. Chatted with the structural engineer guy and the, the theory there was, you know, we look at the columns and we make sure that, you know, we just need to test how thick they need to be. Make sure that it's made outta the right materials. I'm like, that sounds like this person probably should have done a little bit of business development training before coming in here and trying to convince people to become whatever that is.

And so right across the, right across the little hallway was the finance folks from the school of business and they were like, oh yeah, we manage, manage money and help, turn money into more money. And it's a whole sector and like one of the largest sectors in the world. I'm like, oh, this is a, I mean, I come from a pretty, you know, the, my family's pretty fortunate.

I've, you know, had a stock portfolio since I was super young. So I've been exposed to that world and I didn't put the pieces together. That was an entire industry, I guess, until I was making the decision is what I wanted to do with my life. Mm-hmm. And so went to business school, went through the program that they were describing called Prime did a quick bit of investment banking down in Calgary in the public sector world.

Not public sector, like public company world. Yep. Realized that that was like absolutely not my path. And very much over rotate and joined my buddy's startup. We were building diaper sensors for senior homes. Wow. So lived in, lived in nursing homes in Maryland and then Toronto and then San Francisco.

And then ultimately sold the thing to a Swedish company called SCA, came back to Edmonton, worked at Deloitte and corporate finance for about three and a half years, helping other folks sell their businesses. Mostly helping with some fundraising and helping with some public sector work. That one being actual government work.

And then, yeah, and then wanted to get back into the startup world. And so met the one VC that we had in Edmonton at the time named Arden with the Accelerate Fund, which is another sort of government, government backed fund investing in great entrepreneurs that are based in Alberta. It was like, where do I go?

Who do I meet with? Like, I did the entrepreneurial thing. I wanna get back into it. Who do I talk to? Like I don't need to do business model 1 0 1. Where do I go to just meet actual entrepreneurs? I need a co-founder, I need investors. I wanna go and do the next thing. He's like, oh, Startup TNT. It's this happy hour.

It stands for Thursday Night Tradition happens every week. It's at Polar Park Brewing, which is now no longer round. But yeah, you just go have fun, make friends, build companies, people just hang out and and have a time. We go, great. Sounds good. So I show up and the door's locked. The bar is under construction and they're like, oh, this is the state of the Edmonton community.

This is where we're at. This is week seven of this thing. And and they're putting on this newsletter construction, how to build a newsletter, how to engage an audience type thing. Mm-hmm. And yeah, and it was Zach sitting at the bar working on his own newsletter by himself. Like, okay, this is, I was expecting a thing.

And this is, this is very intimate. But it was fantastic. Yeah. And so, you know, we hit it off from there. I was, forwarding somebody else's newsletter and adding my own thoughts to it and I was like, ah, that's kind of a newsletter. I can engage on a conversation about this. Sure. And yeah, kept coming back every week and it turned out to be that Zach ultimately asked me, he was like, do you think we can get 25 investors together?

Everyone puts five grand in a hat, and then we all work together and invest in a great, awesome local company. I was like, a hundred percent. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. We should totally do that. He's like, really? Everybody else thinks I'm crazy. Like, you think we can do that? Absolutely. And so that first one we did was January, February of 2020.

And then we've done, I don't know, probably about 40 since then. Wow. Across Western Canada. And so the idea really took off, especially during COVID when. People had a bunch of time and money and, and looking for cool things to do. And and so yeah, expanded super quickly to Calgary and then Saskatchewan and we did a stint in Manitoba for a couple years and now we've parlayed that over to being in British Columbia.

So that's where we're at now.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Wow. And talk to me about that, because obviously 2019 was okay, but by the end of it, it was getting pretty hairy, you know, talk about launching this in COVID like you said, you know, you get to a bar, I'm surprised they didn't just chain the thing up and say never come back again.

We don't know when we're reopening.

Tim Lynn: Yeah. So thankfully, so thankfully our, like that, that all of the weeks, all of the summits or the first summit was done right before COVID. So the first investment summit, the finale was February 20th, 2020. And so the, a lot of the conversation in the room actually, or not a lot of the conversation, but it was brought up like, oh, this COVID thing, this like China thing.

This is, I wonder what's gonna happen. It's like on some, you know, it's at some ski resort in Italy or something like that. Like the, it was starting to become. A problem. People are like, I don't, I don't know. How bad could it possibly be? And then less than a month later, we're all like stuck sitting at home wondering what we're gonna do with our lives and whether we're gonna be able to go and see our friends again.

And so, yeah, so it was like, I think it was a perfect foundation time, like a formation time to be able to serendipitously get together and do all that sort of stuff. Yeah. I will say happy hours online on Discord. You can only sit in front of your computer every Thursday evening trying to chat with people online.

So many times, especially when it's that late, late in the week and people are all zoomed out and whatever. Totally. But from the investment summit perspective, from the raising money and getting angels together and, and all that side of things, it was a, a blessing in disguise. Really. The, you, now that I think about it in the, in the past, like we were doing those first, that first investment summit we did, everything was in person.

People were coming out to the bar to have the meetings to discuss what was going on. Yeah. And then Zoom became the new normal and it made it a lot easier to engage people. Made it a lot easier to expand geographically. Made it a lot easier. Like our life sciences summit is across Western Canada. We have companies all the way from Winnipeg to Victoria that are in our, right now, current one in, in in late 2024.

And so we wouldn't be able to do that if not for people moving on to Zoom and, and doing things online and stuff like that. Yeah, like I said, bit of a blessing and a curse. Yeah. And then things came back online or came back in person in kind of 2021 and then for real, in 2022. And we were pretty established across multiple jurisdictions and that Yeah, it was just a.

Catalyst that made it work.

Kelly Kennedy : I love that. I love that. And actually, I actually also see it as a giant opportunity. So there's a lot of people who see video calls as a, as like, oh, video calls, right? But there was a time when you had to fly on a plane to have a meeting in Ontario, right? That was the expectation.

And now the fact that we can do business across Canada, in my case, across North America without having to leave my home, is pretty bloody incredible. And I think we forget how incredible that is because there was a time. And, you know, I'm not, I'm not actually negating in-person meetings. What I'm saying is that in the beginning, even that initial conversation really had to be in person in LA or in person in Sarnia or wherever the heck you're going for that introduction meeting.

And now we can really do those introduction meetings just like this and still create a pretty great connection.

Tim Lynn: Absolutely. Yeah, it's great. The yeah, the, I've, it was really funny. So the, the first sort of in-person conference that had all of the startup people that I had met as sort of two dimensional figures across, you know, Calgary and Saskatchewan and stuff like that was the Uniting the Prairies Conference that was hosted in Saskatoon.

And it was my favorite and remains to be my favorite conference that I'd ever been to. Like the conference itself is great. Yeah. But that specific year, 'cause it was sort of the unmasking of like all of these people that I had met online. Yes. And it was like, oh great, that's all these people. And it's like, I think I know you.

And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And and so it was, it was really great. But yeah, absolutely, to your point, the ability to access, you know, different geographies or even, I mean, we're both in Edmonton and we're doing this from our respective, you know, offices or homes or whatever.

And so, it works really well. Yeah. And so, yeah.

Kelly Kennedy : Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know, like in all fairness, we met in person too, but.

Tim Lynn: But we did.

Kelly Kennedy : But, but this is also excellent, right? And I think that that's what I really want people to kind of remember is that as long as you can get that video face to face, you can build trust, you can build a relationship.

And I think there's people who think, well, no, I have to do this Absolutely. In person. And while in person is better, of course, where you can. Honestly, this is pretty good. I, you know, I mean, I feel like me and you have a great connection here. I've met many people online, like you said, who, when we finally met in person, it was like we knew each other, which is the goal anyway, to be, to build that foundation of trust and and connection.

Tim Lynn: Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, we've done, I think, I mean, we, we've started t and t we've done over a hundred deals. I mean, part of the magic is that we've done it, it's a distributed dis diligence community of investors that are working together to invest in startups. And so we've got, you know, over 500 investors that are working together to invest in these awesome companies.

Wow. But like, I, like, like you say, you can build that trust, there is, it's better in person, but you can get like most of the way there online. Especially if it's mostly just sharing information and not so much of the sort of like internal room, poli political dynamic type stuff. That stuff is way better in person to see the body language and that type of thing.

But just to be able to share information, to be able to get to know each other, to be able to do some of the preliminary stuff is great. A a lot of qualifying, a lot of stuff is super easy with video and so, yeah it's such an unlock. I'm glad, glad where we are now, like you said.

Absolutely. That like catalyst through COVID, you know?

Kelly Kennedy : There, there have been blessings from COVID. I know we don't wanna like acknowledge that, but there have been great things that came from COVID and this is definitely one of them. Yeah, totally. Tim, you know, I want you to take me into this essentially micro, micro angel investing.

That's basically what it is. It's pretty incredible. You know, I've talked with a lot of angel investors on this show and you know, when I talk to them, we're talking hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars at a time. Right. I remember talking to you and hearing what you're saying and be like, what.

This is a thing 'cause I'm a millennial. You're a millennial, we're broke. Yeah. We just bought, you know, half million dollar houses and living on, living on the edge. Right. We still wanna invest, we still wanna make good choices, but most of us don't have a hundred K to drop on an angel investment with that level of risk.

But I think a lot of us have five to 10 grand that we could do that with. Talk to me about that idea. I'd never heard of it before I talked to you.

Tim Lynn: Yeah. And so I will, I will preface it by saying that from a securities regulation perspective everybody has to be accredited. So everybody is either makes over 200 grand a year or has over a million in investible assets.

Yeah. And that's not so much a Tim rule as it is a, a securities rule. And maybe there'll be a way around that in the future, but it does also lead to everybody around the table being generally being business owners or professionals or sort of like descendants of professionals or descendants of business owners.

And so it makes a, it makes for a great group, but to your point there's a lot of folks that have invested, off of their buddy's diligence mm-hmm. Which is pretty thin to begin with. I'm like, oh, this is like the next, my buddy's son is the next Mark Zuckerberg, so I'm gonna give him 50 or a hundred grand.

And then they like jets off to The Bahamas and like, the money's gone. Yeah. Or it's just not a great idea. And, you know, fraud aside, it's, it just goes up in smoke because. Maybe it wasn't the best business plan, or even if it was, 80%, 90% of these companies fail. And so what you need to do is build a diversified portfolio of fantastic companies that have been well diligent, which is why we've made over a hundred investments.

And this is why a VC fund is generally, you know, 20 to 40 companies strong in search of finding that diamond in the rough, like at the time of investment. Yeah. You're not making investments off of, yeah, this is the one that's gonna fail like that. It's probably better to just keep your money. But all of them are strong shots on goal.

And to that same analogy, you look at a hockey game, you've got, you know, 20, 30, 40 shots on goal and there's, you know, 2, 3, 4 goals. Yeah. Same math that happens in a VC fund portfolio or a, or a angel investing portfolio. And so to break that down, what I want and what the goal is, is there's a lot of people who have sort of.

Maybe a lot of people is a strong word, but relative to, you know, a hundred million billionaires there's a lot of one to 10 millionaires. And so to build a VC or a angel portfolio, which should be really like at max 10% of the entire portfolio that you've got, hypothetically, if you've got 2 million, 10% of that is 200 grand, then if you want to have say, 20 companies in that, that's $10,000 per company.

Yeah. And you can't get in and have conversations with people, waste a whole bunch of their time, have like two hours of diligence, and they're like all that for 10 grand. Like trying to build a company, trying to raise 2 million bucks, like. I don't know what the math is, but ten two hours or 10 grand, like on an hourly rate, they're working full time for the whole year to raise that money and they can't build a company.

And so these, then you can't get access to these great companies. You can only get access to mediocre companies. Gotcha. And so the trick is we wanna roll up a whole bunch of folks that are really smart, that are really good, that wanna be investing in the community, and are investing in the community to invest alongside.

We also have some folks that are in that sort of, a hundred millionaire range that are investing alongside this because it's easier to get deal flow and working together. You get, and you get better diligence working with a whole bunch of other smart people that can see things that you can't, like from my perspective, I'm more of a finance guy.

I come at things from that customer economics lens. I come at it from the, you know, the money part of the business. But other people more on the product development side, more on the marketing side, more on, you know, how to build a team side. There's like. A whole bunch of facets that go into building a business and all of them need to work well.

And so it's a great group of people to work together and also to be able to drop that check size while simultaneously wrapping it all up under a good brand so that it looks good to other investors as well. Yes, so we co-invest with other sharp folks across the country and really work to do that as well.

Kelly Kennedy : Gotcha. So it, it's essentially one investment through startup TNT.

Tim Lynn: Yeah. No, yeah. Literally one investment. Yeah.

Kelly Kennedy : But, but on the backend, you have quite a bit of people pouring into that pot.

Tim Lynn: Absolutely. Yeah. It's like thousands of investments that we've facilitated into us to then yeah, invest down those hundred companies.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. Wow. Wow. That is, that's pretty cool, dude. That's pretty incredible. Yeah, I early, you know, not early on, but let's call it like a hundred episodes ago or so. Probably more than that actually. Probably like almost 200. But anyway, point being I interviewed Michael Badham from the Georgian Angel Network out of Ontario.

Okay. And that was my first foray into angel investing, and I learned quite a bit during that time. I found it pretty incredible. But one of the parts that I found pretty incredible was. A lot of angel investments don't pan out. Right? Correct. Like, and so he was talking about how like you really have to invest like 15 investments or so to get one winner.

And I was like, my God, how do you do that? How do you, how do you sleep at night? That's gotta be like really stressful. Do you find that with your financial background, that you are better able to pick the winners, you know, using statistics and data?

Tim Lynn: No. If it was that easy, well, first of all, I'm not that old too.

I'm not that good. So the it's a numbers game. Like even the s and p 500, like it's professional. Like this is a, this is a global game that everybody tries to play is pick the right companies that are gonna beat the index. Right. And it's. Like people build teams to try and be able to beat the S&P 500, which is like the most covered, you know, largest companies in the largest economy in the world.

And it's it's a really, really challenging sport. And so to do it in private companies that are super small, that aren't even really companies, it's a group of people working on trying to build a company. Yeah. There's like not a lot of data to run on. It's a function of evaluating the people and whether they're able to really, like what are the hurdles for them to go out and build that business.

So some, a large component of it is market, right? Whether, whether they're gonna build something that the market will actually want, whether that market is gonna exist down the line because they're building something for, you know, five years, 10 years in the future. And so they're, they're skating to where they think the puck will be to continue to use hockey analogies.

Yep. And then the other part is, yeah, like it's, you need a large portfolio, like even in the s and p 500 to continue to use that one like the big five at the time of recording, like the Apple and the, the Facebook and or Meta and Google and Amazon and whatever. Like those ones, absent those ones the entire, the other 495 companies are so far behind where those five are.

Yeah. And who knows with how this'll be, I could look like an idiot in, in the future. But all that said it's a large function of selection and so if you can pick the right ones, then great. But it's smarter to just pick the whole portfolio as long as they are all good. And so to the Georgian guy's point, and to really a lot of people in this space, it's a function of building a well-crafted, diversified portfolio that all of them look good, but who knows how they're gonna play out in the future because really only a few of them will. And those, those ones will carry the rest of the portfolio.

Kelly Kennedy : You really have to have also a good idea of what the future looks like, right?

Like if you're making those bets, sure, you're betting on the companies, but in order to bet the right bet, you also have to have a pretty good idea about what 10 years from now looks like. You know, what does that process look like? How, how are you able, Tim, to essentially forecast and see what will be valuable to the world in the future?

Tim Lynn: Things don't change really that much, right? Like if, even if you think to 10 years ago now we have what, some, some ai, we went through COVID. Now we do things on, on Zoom. But probably, I think people are people people want things to be more simple. People want things to be easier, cheaper. Just broadly, there's some fundamental tenets of like the human personality that are, they exist.

And so. Especially on business to business type companies, which is the predominant focus for where where we play in, in the prairie economy, at the very least it's a lot more rational than what you would think. And so it's, yeah, we think we're gonna be able to solve this problem for, there's a whole bunch of these types of companies we think that we can solve this problem.

For example, so we have a company in, in, in Edmonton called Sketch Deck ai. Daniel's the founder, super sharp guy, structural engineer. He saw the issue on for fabricating comp, like fabrication companies, folks who were making fab structural steel for construction projects. What they do is they essentially get a PDF with a whole bunch of like lines on them that describe what the structural beams are that are needed for the project.

And then these fab shops have to bid on the projects on. Essentially, yeah. They just have to bid on the projects and they have to literally count, like with a ruler and like write out how much they think that this project should be to be able to bid on it, which is obviously pretty dumb. Like in, in this day and age that feels like that can be, call it AI in a way.

Sure. But it's a super niche industry. However these companies want to be bidding on more stuff. They want it to be done easier. And so Daniel saw the opportunity. Built the technology to be able to do that bidding. And then now is selling it to structural steel companies, not only in Edmonton, but across Canada and into the United States.

Wow. And hopefully at the time of this being launched he's absolutely smashing it, but he's already north of seven figures of revenue, which is fantastic. And so, from a home homegrown company here in Edmonton. And so, but the fundamental tenant being, okay, okay, let's, we want more revenue and we want it to be easier to get that great, that is gonna exist, we're gonna continue to build things.

Sure. They're like, core question is, okay, well is somebody else gonna be able to come in and displace you, like to do it cheaper or better or faster or whatever. But what we're betting on is Daniel has the structural engineering background. He's got a whole bunch of customers already, and. Let's see.

Like we think that Daniel's the smart one to be able to navigate that market. He understands it better than us. We think that that market does exist. And so let's give Daniel some cash to be able to see if he can go and take down more of the market and continue to push things ahead. And so I don't have a crystal ball on it, but there's like just some fundamental bets.

So it's mostly betting on the manager or betting on the founder to be able to foresee those things better than us. It's more asking some skill testing questions on how what they think of the world more than, yeah, like I don't, this is also to, to talk about angel investing. One of the, one of the rookie mistakes that I've made in the past, and I think everybody does when they're getting into it, is playing the role of, well, if I was doing it, I would do A, B, and C.

Mm-hmm. This is such a cool technology. If I had it, I wanna see if I can get them to do whatever it's like, but. That's not the game, like they're running it. And so if they don't see it, then it won't work. However, if they do see it, or that's mostly, that's most of the conversation is trying to figure out what how they think about the world and how they're gonna navigate the changes that come over the next 5, 10, 20 years.

And betting on them and their ability foresee those things and so.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. Okay. Okay. I wanna spend a minute there. Yeah, totally. I've never heard that before, but actually that makes a lot of sense. And what you're kind of saying, if I'm hearing you correctly, is you can't put your ideas or the way that you see it in your founder's heads.

They have to see it the way they see it. And if it is not congruent, is that a red flag for you? Is that a, even if you see it as being something else, if they can't see that, is that automatically a red flag?

Tim Lynn: It's automatically a yellow flag, and then it's something to dig into. But yes, for sure.

Yeah, that's the, that's the line of thinking for sure. 'cause otherwise what happens is you end up with a lot of frustration watching somebody sort of flail Well, and they could be doing it right, like they, it could end up being successful, but if it's not the way that you're thinking about it, then it's gonna be really frustrating to watch, because they're gonna make what are perceived mis missteps along the way that it just, it leads to really tricky dynamics.

And so we saw this happen you know, with Yeah, with a company in the portfolio where, you know, an investor just got so upset. They were like, just gimme my money back. This is like, this is insane. You guys don't know what you're doing, blah, blah, blah. I mean, they've continued on to be successful and they're continue, you know, they're continuing to advance, but the, it would just cause such consternation for the investor that they needed out.

And so, that's a very much a one-off situation, but yeah, but it's, it's hard for the founder as well if an investor is just like yelling at them over things that they perceive to be wrong. But are nothing's necessarily wrong. Like the only things that are wrong are things that are like illegal and immoral.

Like, who knows? It could be the right path. It just might not be the path that I think, or they think and so therefore I just shouldn't invest. Like, it's not really that complicated. Yeah. That's why there's an entire market. Like I'm not the arbiter of truth as to whether something's gonna be successful or not.

I just need to make bets that align with what I think is gonna happen.

Kelly Kennedy : Wow. And there's so many factors that are outta our control. As much as we wanna control everything, there's so many factors. Like a COVID could come outta nowhere. The, the idea could be incredible and there could just be something that makes it impossible that is not in our control.

And so I think, where is that line? You know, once you invest in something. Tim, in your opinion, once you've made that investment decision, is it something that you should really just take a step back from and let that founder do their thing? Because, you know, you obviously had enough trust to invest in them in the first place.

What involvement should an investor have after the investment stage?

Tim Lynn: I think the ideal spot, and part of why we wrap everything up into one check and, and write it from our. Like it's one investment from the TNT perspective down into the company is to be able to insulate the founders from the investors so that there isn't that sort of like direct, when am I getting my money back and mm-hmm.

You know, you're not doing the right things, blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, you go through us because the founders need to be insulated from that. The role from my perspective of the investor is to primarily be a champion for the company, and that's a champion. If they say that they need help with finding talent, they need help with finding investors, they need help with finding customers.

If we know somebody, then we should make introductions. If they want some advice, if they think that we've gone through something similar and they want to bounce some ideas off of us, by all means. But where I think it goes wrong is when it's like cramming down advice onto the company. And that's not particularly helpful.

And where I think folks tend to get more involved is when they think that the founder isn't right for the company anymore. I see often. The, the founder or the company will outgrow the founder. So like, if they haven't gone and built a team before, if they haven't gone and done stuff.

This happens a lot in technical focused companies. The technology gets developed and then there's a function of commercialization and building a team and doing sales and doing like all the business stuff. Yeah. They need to hire a CEO and so, but if the technical founder doesn't necessarily want to give that up, which is something that should be tested on in diligence because if they don't want to give it up and they don't, if we don't think that they're gonna be really good at business, this is like a fundamental mismatch here.

Sure. It's not much of a business to build. The like getting involved at that stage and helping to. Install the right CEO, it's effectively like a board, like it, you know, there, there can be a formal board relationship, especially down the line at a series A or a board is properly created, but at the early stage it's sort of like a quasi advisory board that folks that can help move things along.

Yeah. But otherwise, it's not a super involved sport. It's not like private equity or something where you're like getting in and getting dirty. It's, it's giving money to some folks that have the agency to be able to run with it and build cool things with it.

Kelly Kennedy : Totally. And you know, like a lot of these a lot of these founders these days, they're pretty young, right?

Like me and you, we're not spring chickens. We're both in our thirties, right? We've lived a little life, but I'll tell you what, man, when I was in my twenties, I was an idiot. Like, I'm not afraid to say that. And I think in a lot of cases, and I'm not calling all these founders idiots. I think they're incredible smart people.

I just think that there's a lot of life. That happens. Yeah. Between 20 and 35. There just is a lot. And I am not the same person that I was at 25. At 35, and I'm sure neither are you. Right? Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about what it's like because, you know, when I was in my twenties, I knew everything.

No one could tell me shit. I, I knew it all. And I honestly, I, I learned a lot of hard mistakes. I learned a lot of hard lessons because I knew it all. Unfortunately, what that meant was I had to run headfirst into a wall, bounce, shake my head and be like, I'm an idiot. Learn my lesson and keep going. Right.

Totally. But, you know, talk to me when you're, when you're working with these young founders, 'cause I imagine a lot of them are, are in university or coming out of university, maybe they're only a couple years out. They have, they're smart, they're brilliant young people. But they just don't have that life behind them yet.

Like you mentioned before, what, what is the secret to that? Is it that maybe we need to get some people more senior in there advising them and giving them that help? Where do they get that extra help from in your opinion or in your experience?

Tim Lynn: So two things. So one sort of like a.

Preconception that's being tossed out on this one is that all founders are young and they're not, I think the vast majority that we're invested in are probably in their, thirties, forties, folks that have that life experience that are looking at the world from that life experience be like, Hey, this needs to be fixed and there's an opportunity here for me to go and fix it.

And so, yeah, it's not, maybe not the majority, I don't know. I don't have the like, age demographics of the portfolio, but like having the, the life experience and the work experience and the industry experience to then go and create a thing and move the industry forward. Like it requires some, some experience to be able to go and do that.

Yeah. To be able to see the problem and ultimately act on it. The other thing though, and, and to the, the diaper sensor company that, that we were talking about earlier. I think part of what made it really successful was one of the investors. So Ray Ika who's, you know, a fantastic em Antonian was, don't need to go into like his entire life story, but he's like one of the BioWare guys.

He was a fantastic mentor for census share, so it was a whole bunch of, really headstrong folks that are in their twenties. Like everybody was like 22 to 25 to your point, just like running as fast as they can into walls, living on the floor of nursing homes, like just trying to do the classic startup hustle grind thing.

And Ray was this awesome and still is this awesome, calm, thoughtful voice but importantly a respected. Kind of an authoritarian voice that when we needed to, he would give us some answers or give us his thoughts that we would perceive as answers, which would just help us realign the thing and move on past a problem.

Because otherwise, like you said, like a whole bunch of like 20 year olds that have no life experience and are just like running around bashing into shit. Like that's not, it's not good for anybody. Yeah. And so, yeah, so to have, and I, I mean we saw it in the, in that investor. And that is a role, like I was saying, like an investor can play and that was a really active role.

Like it was a call, maybe like once every two to six weeks. Oh, amazing. He even flew out to Maryland to come and see us one time. But yeah, no, the having smart folks who are like industry advisors or folks who are respected by the team, super, super useful in, in being, you know, formative to the company to help just keep things aligned, especially on like co-founder dynamics and stuff like that.

It's absolutely useful.

Kelly Kennedy : I love that. And you know, I'm not, I'm not hating on young people, guys. I was one of you, right? Like I was 23 when I got into business development. I was late, late to the world. I was young in business development. But honestly, I had a lot of growing to do and I didn't realize it.

Like, it's really hard in your twenties to see how little you actually know. Yeah. And I'm not saying that at 35 I have all the answers, either. I just know a lot more now than I did then. And I kind of look back at some of the dumb stuff I did back then. I'm like, what were you thinking kid? But you know, I think everybody gets that way.

I think thirties has this weird effect on us. I don't understand what happens, but I was funny, I was talking to a psychologist, she's like, yeah, 30 to 35 are like some like major growing years for all humans. And I didn't realize it till I was, but yeah, I'm, I'm not, not hating on my young people.

You guys are incredible. Just understand that all the decisions that you make, you may look back and realize you might've made different decisions in your thirties. It's a, it's an interesting transition.

Tim Lynn: Without a doubt. Yeah. But on the, I mean, on the flip side, being too cautious and not making decisions and like trying not to make bad decisions if that's phrased properly, like if you're too cautious, then you won't make any decisions and then you won't learn anything.

And so I think the like. The sort of bang around into walls concept in the twenties is super formative for thirties, and I have no idea what comes down the line. I think you're right. I actually agree. I'm for sure gonna look back at things that I've done in my thirties. Oh, I'm sure. Like I'm, at the time of recording, I'm only 31.

Like yeah, I've made missteps, although already in my thirties and who knows how many more I'm gonna make if there's gonna be a bajillion more. And so yeah, just a function of learning from them and continuing to move forward.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah, totally. Totally. And, and you know what? I wouldn't be the person I am today had I not made all those mistakes.

And so by all means, make the mistakes. We learn lessons in every single one of them. The secret is just to learn the lesson. I think ultimately too, the nice thing about your twenties is that you can screw up real bad and you can recover fairly easily. Right? Like the t it's, it may be like a, a tough time to like, 'cause there's so much happening.

You're building your career, you've maybe just finished university or college, you're building a company. Maybe you're a founder, maybe you're changing the world. But it's a lot, it's a lot of growth in a really short period of time. I think your twenties is like this like crazy compacted growth stage where it really kind of catapults you into your thirties in a completely different place.

But I think the only saving grace of it is sure you, you probably will make mistakes. There will probably be a few of them or a lot of them. But the nice thing is most of the time you can recover from your mistakes in your twenties.

Tim Lynn: Totally. Yeah. And things haven't compounded enough to be able to be like an authoritative figure where then, you know, if you say the wrong thing then nobody's, wow.

There are people like that have gotten to that level that are like getting canceled in their twenties. But there's very few people who are getting canceled in their twenties 'cause nobody really cares what they say. Whereas like down the line after you've like done a few things, you have to be pretty careful about some of the stuff you say or some, some of the ways that things can be perceived or some of the risks that you take.

'cause it can take down all of the compounded growth over the last many years. Yeah. Where that hasn't happened. It's just a function of. Starting and seeing how fast you can compound from there.

Kelly Kennedy : That's right. You've been a founder a really long time. You know, you've been an angel investor a long time.

You've advised businesses a lot. You know, one of the questions that I have for you is, in your journey, in your founder's journey, what were some of the mistakes that, that you might have made that you're seeing now with some of the startups that you're investing in? Like what are some of the advice that you're learning from your own life experience that you're giving, sorry, from your own life experience to some of the startups you're working with today, from your own experience?

Tim Lynn: Yeah, too many. I mean, I think, and to that point, like to function of starting things and then compounding on the knowledge from learning. Learning by doing. I mean, I'm, and I think, I think most entrepreneurs are this way. Like, yeah, learning by doing, not really listening to what other people's mistakes are, like hearing them and then be like, yeah, I can probably do that better than that.

Like, I'm smarter than that. And then like, for sure, making the same mistake. And so, I think a, a company is just a group of people working together to solve a problem. And so it's super important and for me, underappreciated how important that team development is. The team dynamic, the team, like how everybody compliments each other and how everybody works together.

How it, like, how the hierarchy is, how like the right people in the right spots, all that type of stuff. Like, there's like a bunch of trite advice that's out there that I'm not gonna be able to do. Hint, shake a stick at. Like, but having gone through and seeing a few teams and where things are working and where things aren't, it's.

Wildly important. It's super distracting when the team is not working well. Mm-hmm. It makes it impossible to work in anything else because especially once you have a few people working, on the company. That's the only thing that, that like ultimately your job as a founder or a leader of a company is to be providing the resources for the team to go out and execute the mission.

And as soon as the team isn't working and if it like compounds and becomes a problem for the entire team, it becomes systemic. Like the whole thing is just, it's so hard to run with. And so, or if, if you don't have the managerial skills or hire people with the managerial skills to be able to manage enough people and to build out a system and a hierarchy to be able to go and multiply the team, you bump up against a carrying capacity on how many people you can have on the team, which then ultimately impacts.

The amount of impact you can have, the size of the company, whatever. And so yeah, so the team side is, is super huge that I as a finance per like, I'm finance and accounting, right? And so like I go through school, go, go through grade school thinking I'm gonna be an engineer, built buildings, go through university being like, yeah, numbers, public stock market.

It's like, yeah, you just take money and turn it into more money. And then it's like, oh shit, this is actually teams and now this is just people. And I'm like, haven't focused a lot on people. It's like from a formal education background perspective, I'm just sort of bumping into walls as we go through here.

Yeah. And I'm seeing the impact of that. But both, both at t and then also, in portfolio companies, right? There's just like a carry in capacity to weather. People are able to build a team and, and multiply it. And then the other one being from Alberta, where the prairies, where we have a whole bunch of sort of resource extractive export industries that are commodities or construction and housing, which is like effectively a commodity, but with labor.

We don't have a lot of market like sales and marketing background here. It's needed, especially if you're trying to sell things that are differentiated. But we don't really have it innately in our DNA here. It isn't something that super talked about. And so it's something that founders need to put a lot of attention to.

I'd say there's like a trite piece of advice, which is that first time founders focus on products, second time founders focus on distribution. Hmm. And it's, it, I can see why that advice exists. It's super important to focus on, like the best product isn't the one that wins. Like if you think about, you know, apple versus Android or Apple versus P or Mac versus pc, like the distribution and, and the ability to get people to pay for it, I guess.

'cause. Windows has much better distribution than, than Apple. But point being the marketing associated with it and the distribution associated with it and the brand developed influences the margin a lot more than just the quality of the product. And so it's not a function of features, it's not a function of whatever.

It's also a function of how it's presented to the end consumer or the business or whoever the, the purchaser is of whatever you're trying to sell. Yeah. And your ability to get it in front of them. And that strategy is as important, if not more important than the product development.

Kelly Kennedy : Absolutely. And I love that you touched on that and let's, let's use Windows as an example, right?

Sure. Me and you both grew up here very likely. We both used Windows computers in school. Like our entire exposure to computers for the most part was Windows. So obviously we would gravitate towards Windows as business owners, as adults, right? Like. They did an absolute incredible job at exposing the young to their system.

I think in my mind that is why Windows One, it, it has nothing to do with the fact that it might be a better program or not. Maybe Apples is better, but I'll tell you what, I don't know how to use Apples. I know how to use everything in Windows. That is totally it. Like you, you don't need the best product, but you need the best exposure.

Tim Lynn: Yeah. Similarly, I think the iPod Touch was what helped made the iPhone so great because you have a whole bunch of kids that grab, like everybody sort of moved to an iPod Touch and then was sort of used to the, I mean, it's the exact same form factor just without it own part. Yeah. And people, oh, I can add a phone to this thing and it's is like, great, now I'm running the same thing, but it's even better.

And now they don't even need to deal with the iPod touch 'cause the iPhone is so ubiquitous. So back in the early days, that's, I think that was pretty formative to how how they got that much off the ground with the iPhone.

Kelly Kennedy : Oh, totally, totally. And I, I agree completely. And you know, I've talked with a lot of people using the iPhone analogy that, you know, and, and comparing it to ai actually, and the comparison that I make is we love the iPhone.

I remember watching Steve Jobs come out and talk about the iPhone. I watched that one hour thing on, on my computer and just being like, wow, that's super cool. Like they put a phone in an iPod, right? But like, we couldn't, but we couldn't, at the time, back in 2008, we couldn't, at the time have been like, my God, that thing is gonna become a super computer that I used for my banking, that I used for everything in my entire life, my home security, you name it, whatever.

Like, we could not have like, understood the power that iPhone was going to become in our lives. And, you know, I, I use a Samsung, but whatever the point is, seems saying same thing. The supercomputer that we carry in our pockets, you know, 15 years later we could not have seen at that time. Just like right now, you know, we see a lot of cool stuff coming out with ai, but like, and VR and Metaverse, right?

But I don't think right now we have the ability to see the full picture of what is coming, but it's gonna be just as groundbreaking if not bigger.

Tim Lynn: And I agree. And then to like, add onto that and take it back to sort of the investing side, I think it's a function of options. And like financial options.

So options in the financial world are like essentially you're. Paying you, you have a lot of upside, like it's a lot of upside with not a lot of downsides. So you have like options to, hypothetically, if you build land, you then have an option to build a building and then capture value from it that way.

Yeah. And you can have an option to build any sort of building on that land. And similarly, when investing, I think that there's sort of two ways to look at it. There's sort of the income fi, fixed income type folks that are, they want like a dividend stream. They want, you know, certainty as to what they're gonna get.

They're gonna buy Royal Bank because it is the bank that pays out whatever, like three or 4% of a dividend. And like, we know what we're gonna get from this. There's not a lot of growth, but it's not gonna die. Life is gonna be good over here. And then there's the, and there's a whole range. And then there's like using Apple in 2008 as an example.

It's like, oh, this, like, who knows where this like iPhone thing is gonna go. They've already got the Mac. It's like proven that they know how to build technology. This iPhone looks pretty groundbreaking. Who knows what they're gonna turn it into. It could be, could be nothing. Could, they could just go back to being a Mac company, in which case who really cares?

It doesn't really, doesn't really cost that much. Whatever they, like, they shot a shot on goal and they missed and whatever. Yeah. Or. It turns into something and then they continue to iterate on it and it develops and turns into something awesome. And it turns into essentially its own company with, separate products that are, an entire like Fortune 500 company that are AirPods like, you don't know what is gonna come out of a company. And so those options and those, like who knows what's gonna come out of it? We don't know. There's not a roadmap here, but it seems like they have the opportunity to do some cool things. That's an investing strategy in and of its own. Right. And that's sort of where the high growth comes in, is it's not like a, it's not like there's a roadmap and a perfect plan in 2008 as to, what would become iPhone 16.

Sure. But it's like, oh, this would be like, it seems like they could do some cool stuff with this and it's worth taking it bet at. Or giving them some money in order to see if they're gonna be able to go and to do some cool stuff later. Very cool.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah, I, I agree completely. I, I think, you know, I mean, you could look at Apple at that time and say, yeah, this is gonna be big, right?

Like, there's certain things that you can just look at and be like, yeah, this is, this is gonna be big. And you know, I wanted to lead into the next part with that where, talk to me about your vetting and selection process. I know for instance, when I talk to tele Albert Innovates, they don't just invest, they invest in a lot of things, but there are certain things that they are looking for more, particularly specifically med tech, ai, things like that.

Are there specific things that you are looking for at startup TNT right now that maybe stand out above the crowd in 2024? 2025?

Tim Lynn: Yeah, so one of the things one of the interesting things I think about startup, TNT like I was saying, it's a group of, about, in any given summit, there's about, 25, 30, 35 people that are sitting around the individual table.

But there's like 500 investors or more that we have that are actively involved in the, in the community or have invested with us. Then everybody has their own viewpoint. And so what that means is we invest in pretty well everything. So about half of the companies we've invested in are pre-revenue IE they have $0 of revenue and half of them are post revenue.

A solid chunk are hardware companies, so like tangible physical things that you can do stuff with and, and as. And the rest of 'em are obviously software. We'll take deep tech, crazy stuff coming outta the university. Like we've invested in zero point cryogenics, which is making a super cool, it's called a dilution refrigerator.

Yeah. Like borderline, absolute zero for for, you know, crazy quantum computing stuff. All the way on the other side to, we have a great founder in Calgary building this company called Simple Hedge, which is like Robinhood for farmers to help them self hedge their crops on the financial market.

And it's the full gamut. Like we don't, it's long as there's like an opportunity, as long as we think that it's commercially viable, as long as we think that there's a pretty great upside for it, we're interested in having the conversation and interested in, in, in investing in it. There's a distillery right now that we're looking at in the current summit and who knows, like the, the future folks will know at the time of viewing whether we invested in them.

Yeah. Then, yeah, it's, as long as it's got like a enough torque, as long, as long as we think that it's worth, the juice is worth the squeeze in terms of like the upside being worth how much money we have to put into it. We're interested in having that conversation. But yeah, and then that's the sort of startup life and that's like super minority equity, taking a relatively small percentage of the company in order to have a chance at a whole bunch of the upside.

And then there's of course the different side of the table, which is investing in buying entire companies that are a little bit more legacy, a little bit more stable and a little bit less growth oriented. And so. It depends on the flavor.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah. You know, right. Now I wanted to ask you just specifically about Alberta.

You know, we're growing, there's lots of stuff happening here. You mentioned early on there might be some things that we could do better as companies. And you know, I just wanted to kind of ask you, like, in your opinion, I think we're doing some pretty incredible things, but how can you know, Albertan startups, Albertan founders, become more competitive as we head into 20 24, 20 25 on maybe not just a national, but maybe even a global stage?

Tim Lynn: Yeah, I mean that's a, that's a super existential question for for companies and also like our ecosystem, right? How can we be more competitive globally? Yeah, there's a lot, a lot to unpack there. So, interestingly there's a group of folks that are passionate about helping build the Edmonton community.

That have gotten together to there five pillars entrepreneurs, investors, large companies, university and government. Everybody sort of needs to work together in order to build the ecosystem up. And to have a functioning community, thriving community of entrepreneurship. And so as a group of us that are working together to help figure out that problem and figure out some programs or incentives or whatever that, that we can put together to help spur that development of global competitiveness from the Edmonton region and taking advantage of the stuff that we have at the Edmonton region, and it's called the MIT Reap Program.

And hopefully by, like I said, by the time that this is announced or released, that there's some announcements that are being made about the outcomes of that program. But like I said, the intent is to figure out what sort of the, what some of the durable advantages are that we have in the Edmonton region.

So obviously the, we're the most northern. Large city in North America, which comes with its own pros and cons, but focusing on those pros, there's probably some stuff there that we can pull on. Yeah. We have a fantastic university like, top a hundred consistently, top a hundred in the world. In a whole bunch of facets.

We have, you know, we, we built the oil sands, we built the oil, everything to that goes on in this province or in western Canada which comes with a pile of not only engineering, but a whole bunch of call it blue collar technical talent with a whole bunch of innovation in that, that, the art oil world is relatively small compared to the rest of the world.

And so it's a function of taking our innovations and bringing them to the rest of the world as well. You know, the nanotechnology is great here. The AI is great here. There's a lot of technical talent that I think needs to be unlocked from a business perspective here and so. Who knows what we decide is the silver bullet.

But one of the things that consistently gets batted around is we need more business people here helping to take the great technologies that we have and building, which is also the thing that's in the back of my mind and, and why I said earlier around sort of team and access to like sales and marketing or like access to customers.

'Cause those are often the gaps that I see on, on things that are happening in Edmonton or especially Edmonton. Is is where things tend to fall apart. Or not necessarily fall apart, just not take advantage of as much as they otherwise could. Yeah. And so figuring out how to solve those two in a reliable way for folks here to be able to commercialize awesome university technologies or help take things to market I think is.

Is the secret. I just don't know. I don't know enough about how to unlock that. It's like that's a problem that a whole pile of the rest of your guests would've Yes. Are also focused on, well, and everybody knows that it's a problem but don't know how to do it. And it's like, how do we get, how do we get people to move to Edmonton?

It's like, yes, that's a really complicated problem.

Kelly Kennedy : Well, between that and building brand recognition and marketing a product, that is a problem that every single company on planet Earth has on a certain level, right? Absolutely. We're all trying, the guy who figures that out completely wins the world.

Tim Lynn: Yeah, if I could just convince people to buy more of my stuff, I would have a better company.

Yes. That's you and every other company.

Kelly Kennedy : Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Tim, this has been absolutely incredible and thank you so much for coming on Chatting startup, TNT. And you know, one of the things that I talked about before the show was I think what you're doing is incredible. I'm thankful for the work that you guys are doing and I'm sure that there's lots of people listening right now.

You know, we, you know, we have, we have some of the top 20% of earners worldwide listening to this show. What are you guys looking for? What do you guys need to continue to grow into 2025? 2026?

Tim Lynn: Yeah, I think we're working on right now or working on how to scale TNT. So it's mostly, it's a very local product, so it's local investors, investing in local entrepreneurs, engaging their local companies to sponsor engaging local government to help support engaging.

It's a, it's a nucleation point for the local community and it's pretty open in every community that we have is different in its own right. And so we're figuring out how do we expand beyond Western Canada. And so one thing is if you're interested in having startup t and t as a concept in, in your region, we'll be super open to having a conversation around how to help make that happen and help provide some of the, the guidebook on how to do that, on, on how to help facilitate the development of that.

The other one is of course, if you're interested in, if you're in Western Canada and you're interested in getting involved in the community that we already have here we'll be, more than interested in making an introduction to the right person. If, we have weekly happy hours in right now, Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary, and Saskatoon, and, and every once in a while in Regina.

And so if you're interested in coming out and meeting some great people or if you wanna just, I can happy to make an introduction to the right person in the region for you to have a chat, whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, sponsor, whatever person who's vaguely interested in the startup community and interested in spending some time to get to know some folks.

Happy to make the right introduction. Amazing. Amazing.

Kelly Kennedy : And if people want to follow startup, TNT, they wanna keep their ears to the ground and see what's going on. Maybe they wanna follow Tim Lynn and see what's new in your world. What's the best way for them to do that?

Tim Lynn: Yeah, so, startup t t's pretty active on LinkedIn and right now, Instagram and Twitter to some degree.

But startup tnt.com, we also have a newsletter that goes out every week so you can pick your sort of region or community that you care about, and there's a weekly newsletter. And yeah, and then I'm, I'm on LinkedIn. I have some Twitter presence, but I'm mostly LinkedIn, so That'd be amazing.

Kelly Kennedy : Dude, thank you so much. Honestly, thank you. This has been such a great contribution to the Alberta Ecosystem series and I can't be more proud of you guys and your team and what you guys are doing here in Edmonton. Thank you for the work you're doing.

Tim Lynn: And you too. It's awesome. Congratulations on the fantastic podcast. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Kelly Kennedy : Until next time, this has been episode 278 of the Business Development Podcast, and we will catch you on the flip side.

Outro: This has been the Business Development Podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry, and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation and business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.